CUriosity: What makes Colorado so windy—and will it stay that way?
In CUriosity, experts across the CU Boulder campus answer pressing questions about humans, our planet and the universe beyond.
This week, meteorologists Andrew Winters and McKenzie Larson weigh in on the question: “What makes Colorado so windy—and will it stay that way?”
Winds swoop over Colorado's Rocky Mountains. (Credit: by Zach Dischner via )
Whoosh. This month, a series of windy days went roaring through Colorado’s Front Range. Gusts topped out at more than 80 miles per hour on March 17 in Boulder and caused a few power outages.
It’s not an unusual occurrence for the region in its colder months, said the aptly named meteorologist Andrew Winters. In Boulder, locals are no strangers to getting knocked off their bikes by winds that can hit 90 or even 100 miles per hour.
McKenzie Larson installs a precipitation wind shield at the CU Boulder Mountain Research Station at Niwot Ridge in 2023. (Credit: McKenzie Larson)
“You’ll hear people from a lot of places saying, ‘You don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes.’ I think the Front Range has a pretty good claim to being where that’s most true,” said Winters, assistant professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (ATOC) at CU Boulder. “We get severe thunderstorms, tornadoes, hail, strong winds. The only phenomenon we don’t get here in Colorado is hurricanes.”
So how does the Front Range’s weather get so blustery—and will it stay that way as the planet’s climate changes?
It’s a topic that McKenzie Larson, a doctoral student in Winters’ lab, is exploring. She’s originally from Florida but earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at CU Boulder. In the process, she became taken by the state’s more mercurial weather.
“In Boulder, our proximity to the Flatirons and complex terrain pose quite a challenge for weather forecasts,” Larson said. “We can get a lot of temperature whiplashes.”
She explained that, in the Front Range, severe winds tend to come in two flavors: chinook and bora winds.
Boras usually arrive just after a cold front snaps through Colorado, while chinooks bring warmer winds. (The gusts on March 17 fell into that warmer category). They both tend to peak in the winter months and both occur when winds arriving from the west slam into the Rocky Mountains.
“Those warmer winds come more often from the southwest or the west,” she said. “The boras, along with the associated the cold fronts, often come from the northwest.”
When that happens, those westerly winds feel the squeeze. The moving air is forced between the tops of the mountains and what meteorologists call a “stable layer” of the atmosphere—a layer where the temperature of the atmosphere increases with altitude rather than decreases, which is more common. Winds pick up speed as they pass between the mountain tops and this stable layer and, by the time they near Boulder, are ready to scream downhill.
But will living in Colorado always feel like being in the Wizard of Oz?
That’s not clear, Larson said. She noted that as the state warms, that stable layer above the mountains could climb higher in the atmosphere. Without that lid, winds may not feel as much of a squeeze as they pass over the mountains and could slow down.
Larson and Winters that unearthed the first hints that such a slowdown may already be happening. The research was led by scientists at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF NCAR). The group reported that scientists at NCAR recorded one blast of air in Boulder in 1971 moving at a staggering 147 miles per hour. Today, measurements at roughly the same location rarely exceed 100 miles per hour.
Scientists need to do a lot more research before they can say for sure how climate change could shift Colorado’s erratic winds. But those kinds of questions matter for more than just weather buffs, Winters said. Chinook winds moving east were one of the main factors that made the Marshall Fire in 2021 so devastating for Boulder County.
“Even if winds slow down, these events are still going to happen, and they’re going to happen in an environment that will likely have less wintertime snow cover than in the past,” Winters said. “That could lead to more events like the Marshall Fire, especially when we have more people living closer to the mountains.”